Atlanta Serves Sophisticated Southern

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Atlanta Serves Sophisticated Southern
May 6, 2011
by Kim Severson
The New York Times

HEN I moved to Atlanta from New York late last year, I made a few rookie food mistakes. I would corner the dry cleaner, the preschool teacher, every food friend I knew. “So where can I find great barbecue?” I asked.

The answer? You can’t. Atlanta isn’t a barbecue town. That’s not to say you can’t find it. But there is no authentic style of Georgia barbecue. Rather, it borrows from the states around it.

Also, Atlanta is only vaguely a fried chicken town. Certainly, delicious fried chicken is not hard to find, but suggest to an Atlantan that the city is a place of biscuits and chicken and, well, you’ll discover just how thin the skin gets here in the Southern sun.

I compounded these beginner blunders when I suggested, via Twitter, that I missed the food in New York. Kaboom! A local columnist wrote an open letter condemning me. The Southern food experts in this close-knit town handed out the pitchforks and torches.

Atlanta, it turns out, is a bit defensive about its food. It shouldn’t be. Of course, Atlanta is not New York in the way San Francisco is not Los Angeles and Chicago is not New Orleans, even though all those cities are constantly vying for some kind of food supremacy. (New Orleans is an exception; it just hangs out all smug and orders another round of oysters and Sazeracs.)

But, over the past few years, Atlanta has experienced a notable upgrade in ambition that reflects a new kind of sophisticated Southern sensibility centered on the farm but experienced in the city.

It builds, in part, on the formidable foundation created by Atlanta chefs like Scott Peacock and Anne Quatrano. And just to add some weight to the argument that the city is becoming a serious national player, consider that it is home to eight contenders in the “Top Chef” franchise, and on May 19, it will host a huge food and wine festival focused on the South, sponsored by Food & Wine and Travel & Leisure magazines.

Southern food, at least as expressed by a handful of restaurants in Atlanta these days, is farm-driven. Atlanta chefs continue to explore ways to mix technique and trend with country roots. Always, vegetables play a central role. After all, the South had a farm-to-table culture before those upstarts on the West Coast even planted their first crop of organic mesclun greens.

But more than that, the city expresses an intimacy at the table that is downright Italian in its broad generosity and love. Atlanta, despite a population filled with carpetbaggers like me, is a place of family, where things get worked out around the table and everyone always wants to eat.

Here are three restaurants, opened in the past few years, that might give a traveler a good taste of how Atlanta is interpreting what Southern food means.

Cakes & Ale

Nestled right next to the Atlanta city limits, Decatur is the love child of Berkeley and Mayberry. Along with the newly fashionable Westside of the city, it’s where Atlantans are eating. And if they’re lucky enough to get a table, they slip inside this 1,000-square-foot corner shop and let Billy Allin, the chef, take care of them.

The washed ebony tabletops and little zinc-topped bar offer an appeal almost as immediate as the little gougères, filled with warm cheese, and the fried rice balls called arancini (with fennel pollen!) that will help you make it through the cocktail list.

The food here rarely overreaches, and it’s driven by what is growing in the local fields, including the garden behind the house Mr. Allin shares with his wife, Kristin, and their children. That the chef features Chez Panisse on his résumé is immediately evident in his sourcing of ingredients and his ability to stand back and let them speak for themselves.

This, as far as I can tell, is the only place in town where one might find farro and red peas sharing a side plate. A dab of sharp daikon slaw might end up on a cold oyster, braised chicories and a runny egg on some flatbread. Not Southern enough? How about marinated collard greens, vegetal and vinegary, ringed by some slices of lomo, a house-dried pork tenderloin.

Always, there are larger dishes of pork, like a well-executed saltimbocca, served over a pillow of buckwheat polenta sharpened with balsamic. And there is crisp-skinned whole trout, imported all the way from North Carolina, where Mr. Allin has found a place that produces fish so cleanly farmed that you’d be hard-pressed to believe he didn’t just wade into a Georgia stream and catch one himself.

Desserts and baked goods have been a weak spot — gingery “phatty cakes” with mascarpone and outstanding bread notwithstanding. But when the pastry chef Cynthia Wong and the rest of the Cakes & Ale crew move into a bigger space nearby and open a bakery, one imagines things will get better.

Cakes & Ale, 254 West Ponce de Leon Avenue, Decatur; (404) 377-7994; cakesandalerestaurant.com. An average meal for two is about $95. (All prices are without drinks or tip.)

Miller Union

HEN I moved to Atlanta from New York late last year, I made a few rookie food mistakes. I would corner the dry cleaner, the preschool teacher, every food friend I knew. “So where can I find great barbecue?” I asked.

The answer? You can’t. Atlanta isn’t a barbecue town. That’s not to say you can’t find it. But there is no authentic style of Georgia barbecue. Rather, it borrows from the states around it.

Also, Atlanta is only vaguely a fried chicken town. Certainly, delicious fried chicken is not hard to find, but suggest to an Atlantan that the city is a place of biscuits and chicken and, well, you’ll discover just how thin the skin gets here in the Southern sun.

I compounded these beginner blunders when I suggested, via Twitter, that I missed the food in New York. Kaboom! A local columnist wrote an open letter condemning me. The Southern food experts in this close-knit town handed out the pitchforks and torches.

Atlanta, it turns out, is a bit defensive about its food. It shouldn’t be. Of course, Atlanta is not New York in the way San Francisco is not Los Angeles and Chicago is not New Orleans, even though all those cities are constantly vying for some kind of food supremacy. (New Orleans is an exception; it just hangs out all smug and orders another round of oysters and Sazeracs.)

But, over the past few years, Atlanta has experienced a notable upgrade in ambition that reflects a new kind of sophisticated Southern sensibility centered on the farm but experienced in the city.

It builds, in part, on the formidable foundation created by Atlanta chefs like Scott Peacock and Anne Quatrano. And just to add some weight to the argument that the city is becoming a serious national player, consider that it is home to eight contenders in the “Top Chef” franchise, and on May 19, it will host a huge food and wine festival focused on the South, sponsored by Food & Wine and Travel & Leisure magazines.

Southern food, at least as expressed by a handful of restaurants in Atlanta these days, is farm-driven. Atlanta chefs continue to explore ways to mix technique and trend with country roots. Always, vegetables play a central role. After all, the South had a farm-to-table culture before those upstarts on the West Coast even planted their first crop of organic mesclun greens.

But more than that, the city expresses an intimacy at the table that is downright Italian in its broad generosity and love. Atlanta, despite a population filled with carpetbaggers like me, is a place of family, where things get worked out around the table and everyone always wants to eat.

Here are three restaurants, opened in the past few years, that might give a traveler a good taste of how Atlanta is interpreting what Southern food means.

Cakes & Ale

Nestled right next to the Atlanta city limits, Decatur is the love child of Berkeley and Mayberry. Along with the newly fashionable Westside of the city, it’s where Atlantans are eating. And if they’re lucky enough to get a table, they slip inside this 1,000-square-foot corner shop and let Billy Allin, the chef, take care of them.

The washed ebony tabletops and little zinc-topped bar offer an appeal almost as immediate as the little gougères, filled with warm cheese, and the fried rice balls called arancini (with fennel pollen!) that will help you make it through the cocktail list.

The food here rarely overreaches, and it’s driven by what is growing in the local fields, including the garden behind the house Mr. Allin shares with his wife, Kristin, and their children. That the chef features Chez Panisse on his résumé is immediately evident in his sourcing of ingredients and his ability to stand back and let them speak for themselves.

This, as far as I can tell, is the only place in town where one might find farro and red peas sharing a side plate. A dab of sharp daikon slaw might end up on a cold oyster, braised chicories and a runny egg on some flatbread. Not Southern enough? How about marinated collard greens, vegetal and vinegary, ringed by some slices of lomo, a house-dried pork tenderloin.

Always, there are larger dishes of pork, like a well-executed saltimbocca, served over a pillow of buckwheat polenta sharpened with balsamic. And there is crisp-skinned whole trout, imported all the way from North Carolina, where Mr. Allin has found a place that produces fish so cleanly farmed that you’d be hard-pressed to believe he didn’t just wade into a Georgia stream and catch one himself.

Desserts and baked goods have been a weak spot — gingery “phatty cakes” with mascarpone and outstanding bread notwithstanding. But when the pastry chef Cynthia Wong and the rest of the Cakes & Ale crew move into a bigger space nearby and open a bakery, one imagines things will get better.

Cakes & Ale, 254 West Ponce de Leon Avenue, Decatur; (404) 377-7994; cakesandalerestaurant.com. An average meal for two is about $95. (All prices are without drinks or tip.)

Miller Union

Miller Union has the confidence of a good-looking high school student with a really generous personality: a charming, polished beacon on the Westside, a part of Atlanta that has transformed itself from an industrial other-side-of-the-tracks wasteland to the place to open a restaurant.
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Rich Addicks for The New York Times

Miller Union is in the Westside, which has become the place to open a restaurant in Atlanta.
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Rich Addicks for The New York Times

Relaxing at Empire State South's boccie court before dinner.

Steven Satterfield, the chef, and Neal McCarthy, the manager, are running a restaurant that has gotten more attention in the last year or so than any other in the city. Martha Stewart loves it (she hosted Mr. Satterfield on her show). The major food magazines love it (Food & Wine included it in a Southern cooking roundup). The publicity machine behind it is good — so good that the buzz sometimes seems to work against it. People say it’s overrated, too simple, too, well, popular.

But the people behind the restaurant don’t care about all that, and neither should you. They just love what they do and the food is often exactly what I want to eat.

Mr. Satterfield, a Georgia native who spent time cooking at Watershed, a much-loved restaurant where Mr. Peacock was the chef, is driven by vegetables, herbs and the purity of the plate. Things should taste the way they do when they come from the ground (or the pig or the chicken, for that matter). As he sees it, his job to coax the flavors along.

A feta snack — essentially buttery, salty cheese and crunchy vegetables — hits almost every table. But the Southern pantry also gets infused into plenty of dishes. Pickled vegetables are regulars. Delightful little fritters made from grits and country ham are made creamy with local raw-milk tomme cheese. Sorghum sweetens pork belly.

The most discussed dish might be his egg baked in celery cream. People argue that it’s too subtle — but I dare you to resist dipping corners of grilled bread into the rich fondue that results when the yolk is broken.

A couple of pieces of chicken pan-seared to a perfect crispness arrive with whichever vegetables came through the back door — on a recent visit, spring peas and Vidalia onions. It’s pure. It’s simple. It’s delicious.

You can make even better use of those vegetables with a Southern vegetable plate that seems always to feature some kind of braised greens. It’s a dish that will only get better as the growing season progresses.

Desserts come to table like dear friends. Lauren Raymond, the pastry chef, puts out crisps and simple fruit dishes and puddings. The ice cream, which at lunch gets turned into fantastic sandwiches with flavors like Almond Joy, is worth a scoop.

Miller Union, 999 Brady Avenue NW, Atlanta; (678) 733-8550; millerunion.com. An average meal for two is about $75.

Empire State South

Empire State South opened last year with a full-on ambitious Southern vibe. Hugh Acheson, a revered master of the genre, has a loyal legion of fans who first fell in love with his Five & Ten in Athens, Ga., (and, most recently, watched him on “Top Chef Masters”).

Expectations were high when he arrived in Atlanta, and there were enough stumbles in the beginning to disappoint. The location inside a midtown office-hotel complex can make eating there feel impersonal. Service couldn’t seem to hit the right note. It took Empire a little time to find its feet.

Things have improved, and there may be no better place to get such a complete sampling of Southern classics, riffs on the meat-and-three concept and a few jars of “put ups” — onion jam, tomato butter — to take home. Breakfast here is a great idea, and you can get a quick pimento cheese sandwich to go if you are in a hurry for lunch.

At dinner, I always order the tray full of little jars packed with small bites of delicious things, like boiled peanut hummus, perfect light-cured pickles, bacon marmalade and that essential scoop of Southern caviar, pimento cheese. The expense account set might want to try a tin of Georgia sturgeon caviar from fish farmed upstate. Often, American caviar products are muddy and mushy. Not this one.

Although the menu is always changing, look for the classic shrimp and grits dolled up with preserved lemons. And mine the menu for the side dishes, ordering anything that has kimchi rice grits or creamy cauliflower farrotto, risotto’s earthier cousin, in a supporting role.

Just tread lightly. I had a brown butter chowchow on a strip steak that changed my view of the classic cabbage relish, and not in a good way. I had muddled dishes of tilefish and arctic char that conveyed absolutely no sense of place.

Desserts are inconsistent, but some hit their notes perfectly. A peanut and Coke soft serve with peanut funnel cake was inspired, and you can’t go wrong with a fried pie. It’ll make you wander over to the outdoor boccie court happy and ready to work it off.

Empire State South, 999 Peachtree Street, Atlanta; (404) 541-1105; empirestatesouth.com. An average meal for two is about $85.